When Iraqi helmer and screenwriter Hasan Hadi won the Golden Camera Award for Best Feature at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival for The President’s Cake, the competition’s winner, Iranian director Jafar Panahi, offered some advice. “Mind you, I won this award 30 years ago and it has raised my expectations for my second feature. Don’t worry, just make it,” he said.
Since The President’s Cake became the first Iraqi title to make the international feature Oscar shortlist, Baghdad-based Hadi has found that expectations for his feature debut are higher than ever. “It’s an incredible honor,” he marveled, adding, “For the first time I feel like a movie is being treated like a soccer team. Now we’re in the World Cup. … It’s the first time[the audience]feels like they’re a part of it and that they have something to root for. … It puts a responsibility on you.”
For Hadi, one of the most rewarding aspects of the film’s success is that it renewed the faith of Iraqi artists and created new opportunities for them. He is overwhelmed with emails and text messages from people who have inspired him. After seeing Cake in Cannes, the head of France’s national film organization CNC asked Hadi how his organization could support Iraq’s film industry. The two sides continued to maintain contact, and in early November, the French and Iraqi governments signed a film cooperation agreement aimed at strengthening cultural and artistic cooperation through the exchange of expertise, capacity building, and the development of policies to support the Iraqi film industry.
Of course, the “President’s Cake” has already contributed to its capacity development. Financing would have been much easier if the film had been made in another country, but Hadi insisted on filming in his home country. Even though he had to bring in some international department heads, he insisted that other positions be reserved for Iraqis so they could learn and grow.
“President’s Cake” was backed by Eric Roth and Mariel Heller of the Sundance Institute.
A co-production between the United States, Qatar, and Iraq, the film features many of Romania’s top talents, including cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Pandur and editor Andu Radu, both colleagues of Cristian Mungiu, one of Romania’s most famous filmmakers. Hadi, a fan of Pandur’s cinematography style, says, “He talked about the story and the script in a way that I immediately knew he understood what I wanted to achieve here.” Another affinity between Romanians and Iraqis lay in the fact that both knew the difficulties of living under dictatorships.
For Hadi, the Sundance Institute proved to be the basis for the creation of “President’s Cake.” First, he attended the Writers Lab, where he met Eric Roth and Mariel Heller, who both joined the film as executive producers. He was also accepted into the Director’s Lab. So it was “very important to me to have the opportunity to test the visual language, the tone of the film, and the structure of the scenes,” says the master’s degree in New York University’s film production program.
Qatar’s contribution was made through funding from the Doha Film Institute. (Notably, the agency also funded three other projects on this year’s international feature shortlist: Sherian Davis’ Jordanian film All That’s Left of You, Annemarie Jassir’s Palestinian film Palestine 36, and Kauser Ben Hania’s Tunisian film The Voice of Hind Rajab.) Furthermore, while attending the 2025 Qumra Festival in Doha, Hadi gained international sales agency and learned that the film had been selected for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and won the Audience Award in the same category.
What will Hadi do next once the promotional whirlwind is over? Panahi has nothing to worry about. Hadi already has another project in mind, although it hasn’t been finalized yet, and will be collaborating again with producer Leah Cheng Baker, an NYU classmate. “This is another Iraq project from a different period that is less well known, even from a personal perspective,” he says.
